Bill Gates: ‘Techno-Fixing Luddite or world savior?

Commentary: Obsolete technology dooms Billionaires Club to failure

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Is Bill Gates a “Master of the Universe,” the global savior leading his new “Billionaires Club” of philanthropists destined to save the world? Or is he an obsolete “Techno-Fixer,” a recycled 19th century-style Luddite whose well-intentioned investments have unintended consequences, will backfire, fall short of saving Planet-Earth from inevitable collapse by 2050?

Reuters

Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates leaves after speaking at a breakfast meeting hosted by Civita, a liberal think tank, in Oslo in November.

Great question: in a new Rolling Stone interview by Jeff Goodell we hear “the richest man in the world explain how to save the planet.” Yes, Gates’s goal is to “save the planet,” and fast, because he knows, as environmentalist Bill McKibben put it in Foreign Policy, “it may already be too late.”

Gates’s approach is no surprise. As Goodell puts it, Gates is “not only the richest man in the world ... he may also be the most optimistic.” He believes the “world is a giant operating system that just needs to be debugged.

Gates’s driving idea, the idea that animates his life, that guides his philanthropy is the hacker’s notion that the code for these problems can be rewritten, that errors can be fixed, that huge systems, whether it’s Windows 8, global poverty or climate change, can be improved if you have the right tools and the right skills.” Just basic coding, right?

And while Gates “has very little Master of the Universe swagger,” the foundation he runs with his wife Melinda is “like a giant start-up whose target market is human civilization.” Another Silicon Valley IPO, right?

But, swagger or not, Gates really is the “Master of the Universe, with a bankroll that could soon exceed $100 billion. He’s founder of the nicknamed “Billionaires Club,” 122 billionaires who signed the “Giving Pledge” committing to give away half their fortunes in philanthropic ventures. So in a way they could all be called “Masters of the Universe.”

Are they global saviors or just superrich Luddites, a modern band of the 19th century English artisans who rebelled against the machine age and the Industrial Revolution?

Tell Gates ‘Techno-Fixing’ won’t work, will backfire on humanity

Skeptics warn that Gates and all billionaire philanthropists are trapped in the past, “Techno-Fixing” Luddites, to borrow from Michael and Joyce Huesemann’s book, “Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won’t Save Us or the Environment.” They warn that the “negative unintended consequences of technology are inherently predictable and unavoidable” ... that techno-optimism is completely unjustified ... that “modern technology, in the presence of continued economic growth, does not promote sustainability, but hastens collapse.”

Get it? “Techno-Fixing” optimism will backfire, accelerating collapse, in spite of the best of intentions of superrich philanthropists like Bill Gates. In the introduction to “Techno-Fix,” Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb,” and his wife Anne tell us the “claim that technology will solve the problem ... is part and parcel of Western culture.” We want to be heroes, saviors, master of the universe. But our “record of cures” has proven “ineffective.”

The problems of the next generation demand new approaches and new solutions in new political, moral, spiritual and cultural arenas that are substantively different from myopic efforts to create the “next big thing,” a new social-media Facebook, Twitter or WhatsApp, bankrolled by another Silicon Valley private equity billionaire. No, “Techno-Fixing” won’t work.

Still, the “general public, business people, governments and most economists appear to believe that population and per capita consumption can grow indefinitely ... that the rich can get richer and the poor can catch up ... that human ingenuity leading to technological innovation can solve the problems associated with growth ... and that eventually all economic inequities can be eliminated by growth itself.”

But this “Techno-Fixing” optimism, this faith in technology is misleading Gates, will “hasten collapse.”

Gates plan for a new ‘miracle energy’ solution ... already abandoned

But whatever their individual motivations, what about the big picture: Can Gates and his Billionaires Club really “save the planet?” Or just 122 ego trips. Are they focused on the critical issues? Do they have enough time? And most important, will politicians, fundamentalists and dictators like Putin cooperate on “saving the planet?”

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